Description

Description at the very bottom

This is by far my most ambitious work so far and even though I put a lot of effort into not becoming a one-hit wonder (for that it has to become a hit first anyways, doesn’t it?) I am not so sure that I will ever make anything comparable in my life. If you ever made a work of art, you know that there are what could be seen as sets of rules that emerge from the individual artwork: They are like the rules of a game that only show themselves to you when you play it.

I worked on this book for so long until every question on every aspect that emerged was answered by me in such a way, that I could not come up with a better solution for it. And they were many of these aspects as they were over 10.000 analogue photographs from a timespan of over 7 years, and later a book with over 500 fully designed pages – no filler. From the selection of photographs, the sequencing, the pacing, the telling of the story, the chapters, the page-spreads, the individual pages, the layout, the color correction, the texts, the fonts, the meaning and the message, the format, the paper quality and weight, the print quality, the cover: I worked on this for so long until I could not come up with better answers for anything. Absolutely no compromises were made regarding the artistic qualities, no costs were saved: It is 100% the thing I imagined ideally. I would not have wanted it to be published by a publishing house just because in the first place I thought it’d hurt the cover or the book-spine design-wise. That’s how precious this work is to me.

It is aimed at everyone who loves photography and can relate to the ways of learning the craft by themselves. But more importantly it is aimed at people who know the feeling of being lost in this world, which too often feels like it is impossible for creative personalities to fully and freely develop themselves.

The book deals with these topics in such a way as that it shows certain connections between things: The feeling of being lost and the identification with everything seperating, the inability to develop as a creative person and the predisposition for addiction problems and mental illnesses. I tell this through the book itself, through the texts but also through my personal story. I started taking photos as a mean to keep me distracted when I battled a drug induced psychosis. Taking photos and waiting for the films to be developed became an obsession which got me through the worst of it. Later, when taking photos of everything was an inseperable part of my life, I documented the depths of my depression. Today, I still struggle at times, but I don’t take these kinds of pictures anymore.